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Cecil the Lion and Robert Mugabe

Robert Mugabe speaks at an event honoring his ninety-first birthday, in February. At one celebration, guests ate elephant meat and Mugabe received a lion trophy.Credit PHOTOGRAPH BY JEKESAI NJIKIZANA/AFP/GETTY

I interviewed Robert Mugabe the day after he was elected Zimbabwe’s Prime Minister, in 1980, in the country’s only democratic poll. The election marked the end of a fifteen-year civil war and ninety years of British colonial rule. Mugabe made no pretense of sustaining democracy. “As you saw from the decision of the people, it is virtually only one party, the Patriotic Front, that is in power,” he told me. In a nine-way contest, his party had taken sixty-three per cent of the vote. “The rest of the parties have been rejected, so we have a one-party state already.”

By 1987, when Mugabe became President, he had consolidated his power over every branch of government, and he has ruled ever since. Today he is the world’s oldest national leader. Four months before a Minnesota dentist killed Cecil the lion, Mugabe celebrated his ninety-first birthday with a feast of wildlife. The menu included dishes of young elephant, killed especially for a party with twenty thousand of Mugabe’s supporters. Another elephant was killed so that constituents could celebrate, too. Mugabe was presented with a lion trophy and a crocodile trophy that were to be stuffed.

Mugabe’s birthday feast was held just four days before World Wildlife Day, on March 3rd. “It’s time to get serious about wildlife crime,” U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said at the time.

Wildlife has long been exploited, whether in white-ruled Rhodesia or black-ruled Zimbabwe. When I covered the civil war for Rhodesia’s independence, in the seventies, a popular shop carried tables made from elephant feet (complete with toenails), as well as briefcases, boots, and belts from crinkled gray skin, whips from thick tail hairs, and ivory jewelry and knickknacks from tusks. Some elephants had been culled; far more were simply slaughtered. Other wearables, carryables, and souvenirs were crafted from hunted rhinos, cheetahs, impala, leopards, and giraffes. Zebra-skin rugs were for sale, too.

Mugabe’s reign has been distinctive for the cycle of poverty, poaching, and political corruption that have fed off one another in ways deadly for both the human and animal species. When Zimbabwe gained full independence from Britain, in 1980, the country had the potential to be a breadbasket for the rest of Africa. The Zimbabwean dollar was almost on a par with the American dollar. Inflation was just over five per cent. Since then, the economy has been chronically mismanaged; the three defining tenets have been corruption, greed, and revenge, under the rubric of “indigenization.” Zimbabwe witnessed ethnic cleansing against opposition tribes in the eighties. Mugabe’s government also harassed white farmers, to scare them into selling their holdings; in 2000, it began seizing commercial farms outright. They were distributed among ruling Party faithful, many of whom were inept or uninterested in farming. The economy began to rot. Investment dried up. Manufacturing declined. Inflation soared.

By 2006, the Timesreported, toilet paper cost more than four hundred Zimbabwean dollars. That was for a single two-ply sheet—a full roll cost more than a hundred and forty-five thousand Zimbabwean dollars. Inflation neared eighty billion per cent in 2008 and 2009, the world’s highest rate, The Economistreported. A single egg cost fifty billion Zimbabwean dollars. The government printed a hundred-trillion-dollar bill. It began abandoning its largely worthless currency, in favor of eight foreign currencies, including the U.S. dollar. The process of demonetization is being completed this summer. In June, when it started, an American dollar could buy thirty-five quadrillion Zimbabwe dollars.

Poverty has seriously worsened. Mugabe describes himself as both a practicing Catholic and a Marxist, but his birthday party was held at the Elephant Hills golf resort, near Victoria Falls, just up the road from the haunts of Cecil. Mugabe was honored with seven birthday cakes. One was so large that it had to be carried in by eight men; another was described as the size of a mattress. The celebration reportedly cost a million American dollars, in a country that now suffers up to ninety-five per cent unemployment and underemployment, according to the C.I.A.’s World Factbook. (Mugabe conceded during his last election, in 2013, that at least sixty per cent of his countrymen were jobless). Three-quarters of Zimbabwe’s population lives below the poverty line.

“It’s sad when wildlife is abused, but the Zimbabwean people have been suffering decades of abuse under the wily old Mugabe, who seems never to relent and never to go away,” Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, told me last week.

The plight of Zimbabweans has forced them to live off the wild. Poverty, inefficient farms, a growing population, and fuel shortages have produced massive soil erosion and loss of forests. “With the damaged soil unable to grow crops, people continue to turn to poaching as a way to eat and earn income,” the African Wildlife Foundation has warned. Poachers have stooped to cyanide to kill big game in Hwange National Park.

According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, which tracks threats to biodiversity on its Red List, at least forty-three species are now endangered in Zimbabwe. More than sixty per cent of the country’s rhinos were killed by poachers between 2003 and 2005, according to the World Wildlife Fund. Their horns are valued for medicinal use and as aphrodisiacs. A single horn can fetch more than two hundred and fifty thousand American dollars.

The president of the Zimbabwe Conservation Task Force, Johnny Rodrigues, has implicated government officials in managing or profiting from poaching syndicates. “The big issue is that there are some bigwigs involved in poaching, and this should be thoroughly investigated,” he told local media, in 2013.

Mugabe’s autocratic rule has remained almost impossible to investigate or challenge. Opposition parties are officially permitted but unofficially not tolerated. “Human-rights abuses range from violent attacks, and sometimes murderous ones, on opposition figures to detentions and harassment,” Roth said. In June, the State Department accused Zimbabwe of not only curtailing freedoms of speech, press, assembly, association, and movement but also of abducting and torturing dissidents—with no recourse. “Corruption occurred at every level of the police force,” the annual U.S. human-rights report declared.

Last Friday, Zimbabwe demanded the extradition of Walter J. Palmer, the Minnesota trophy hunter who shot Cecil with an arrow and then, forty hours later, finished him off with a gun. The country’s environmental minister announced that the “foreign poacher” had to be held to account for his crime.

Robin Wright is a contributing writer for newyorker.com, and has written for the magazine since 1988.